From reader Bushfire:
The Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, a group of pro-choice organizations across the country, needs your help in fighting Bill C-484, the “Unborn Victims of Crime Act”. This bill seeks to give a second conviction to anyone who would harm a pregnant woman, making it seem that two separate people were harmed. This is a thinly veiled attempt to make a fetus a legal person and recriminalize abortion in Canada. The ARCC has an online petition you can sign here. They are also running out of money fighting this bill, which has passed a second reading in Parliament. If you are able to donate money, you can go here. For more information about Bill C-484 and the ARCC go to their website.
Head over there if you’re a pro-choice Canadian or a supporter of abortion rights around the world.
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thanks for posting this – there’s been virtually no coverage of this in the MSM. from the ARCC home page, you can also access information about private member bill C-537, designed for the “protection of conscience rights in the health care profession” – i.e. allowing pharmacists to not fill BC prescriptions or forward the scripts to other pharmascists, etc.
Thank you so much for posting this, Jill. I know that Joyce and the rest of us baby-eating Canucklehead agitators are grateful for any and all assistance.
For more background on C-484, check out the Birth Pangs Activist Page and the regularly updated C-484 media round up at the Bread and Roses forum. The Oppose C-484 Facebook group is also a valuable and informative resource.
Gah, I HATE it when the stupidity spreads up North into my country.
Thanks much for this, Jill, I’m definitely signing the petition.
But what if the pregnant woman herself believed that her ‘baby’ had been killed? Why should the pro-choice clump-of-cells perspective prevail when it was HER motherhood that was affected?
The first thing that any woman — any human being — who is assaulted is aware of is that s/he has been assaulted. An assault that kills a fetus has to be a pretty severe assault on the pregnant woman, and that is the crime that we must focus on. Bill C-484 ignores that crime, in fact tries to pretend that fetal death can occur independent of it, which is a lie.
C-484 is nothing more than a backdoor attempt to recriminalize abortion in Canada, as its supporters both deny and confirm every time they speak to it. Please sign the petition, and please speak to all your friends.
It’s incredibly obvious how anti-woman this bill is, and it’s amazing to me that Epp can even say with a straight face that its to protect pregnant women. The bill pretends to give an extra criminal charge to someone who attacked a pregnant woman, but that’s not even necessary because judges currently can and do use pregnancy as an aggravating circumstance to give the criminal a higher conviction. Giving a fetus legal personhood status would not deter men from violence against a pregnant woman. So not only is this bill completely ineffective, but it is chock full of anti-choice wording that makes it an obvious attack on abortion rights. In the bill they call a pregnant woman a “mother” and a fetus a “child”, even though these terms have never been used this way in the Criminal Code and would be quite confusing in a court of law. It also contradicts the criminal code in several other ways.
So basically, you have a bill that obviously wouldn’t accomplish a thing and contradicts the basic principles of Canadian law. It is so moronic that our politicians even have to sit around discussing this. It’s not even a real bill, it’s just a piece of anti-choice propaganda that wouldn’t even make sense in our laws, yet it’s passed second reading in Parliament.
It’s so infuriating that anti-choicers can use their powers as politicians to make fucked-up bills that do nothing but take away hard-earned rights. Equally infuriating that the media portrays the bill as an honest attempt to help pregnant women- it really shows you how the media is a right wing propaganda machine.
Have people seen the just-released Angus-Reid poll on C-484? 68 per cent nation-wide are in favour of the bill, although the A-R question imho is loaded. It claims that the act does not apply to consensual abortion or any act or omission of the mother, which of course Epp himself claims, but a claim is not an argument and the bill is internally contradictory, as well as in conflict with Canadian law.
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